


Helping Hands

by Viola_Laterra



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 01 Spoilers, Season/Series 02 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23148430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viola_Laterra/pseuds/Viola_Laterra
Summary: Chidi needs Eleanor's help with something.  She's still trying to work out how she feels about him, but it's nice to be able to provide assistance when it's needed.
Relationships: Chidi Anagonye/Eleanor Shellstrop
Kudos: 28





	Helping Hands

"Eleanor?" Chidi's voice sounded strange. Eleanor played a little guessing game as she got up from the couch, trying to decide if it was moral or physical constipation making him sound like that; she wasn't sure why he didn't just come in, anyway. She utterly lost the guessing game as she opened the door and saw that Chidi's face, feet, and hands were entirely covered with three-inch-long needles. *That* was something she couldn't have anticipated, even after everything they'd been through here. Though maybe she should have, somehow.

"Chidi!" she exclaimed, stepping aside to let him in, watching with sick fascination as he shuffled his way inside, clearly trying not to disturb the needles as he moved. "What happened?" she asked, trying not to laugh at how awkward he looked. How was it that he could so often make her want to laugh and cry at the same time? Because he looked so pathetic, even when he also looked ridiculous. Like a dorky puppy you wanted to cuddle with -- but maybe also kick, just a little, sometimes. That was horrible. She shouldn't think things like that, when she was trying to improve herself. Not like she'd ever actually kicked a puppy, when she was alive. Well... not on purpose. And certainly not when she was sober! She definitely shouldn't think of Chidi like that.

While Eleanor wrestled internally with this errant little bit of cruelty, trying to squash it down, Chidi managed to get himself seated opposite the chalk board on the other side of the room.

Eleanor sat down across from him. "Well?" she asked, waving her hands towards his face.

Chidi sighed very slowly and carefully. He said, "Vicky, I guess... wanted to try needles? For torture today?" His voice was tight in an effort not to move his lips.

Eleanor said, "That... kinda seems like actual torture?" Chidi started to nod, then winced, then made a sad little half cry of pain as the wince tweaked the needles around his eyes. At this point Eleanor found zero cruel humor in the situation: any part of her that thought this was funny totally melted into how helpless he was and how compelled she was to do something about it. She sighed and said, "Want some help getting those out?"

Chidi looked at her, eyes miserable in his immobilized face. "Please." Eleanor came over and perched next to him on the couch, and started to delicately extract needles from the outside of the cloud, near Chidi's right ear. "Ouch!" he said. 

"Sorry!" Eleanor replied defensively. "I've never had to remove needles from someone before!" Then she sighed, and amended, "Except that one time whem my friend was pretending to be an acupuncturist, and she needed me to help her, and I kind of got stuck with removing the needles. Uh. No pun intended."

Chidi closed his eyes and murmured, "Why am I not surprised." "Well." Eleanor said, "I'm what you've got, at the moment, so you're just going to have to deal with it." Whether she was irritated with the resignation in his voice, or just feeling bad about having been such a jerk when she was alive, she wasn't sure. 

But then Eleanor sighed. "I'll try to be more careful." They sat in silence for a moment while she slowly extracted the needles, one at a time. She thought to herself that these were much harder to get out than the acupuncture needles had been. Of course, these needles were intended for torture, so, maybe that made sense. Eventually she got all of the needles out of Chidi's face and then saw that there were little beads of blood everywhere there had been a needle, a deep red against Chidi's dark skin. "Hold on," she said.

A moment later she emerged from the bathroom with a damp towel, and tried to hand it to Chidi, but as he raised his hand awkwardly to her she was reminded that there were needles in his hands, too. She blew out a sigh of frustration, and settled in to gently wipe the blood away herself.

"I mean, it's not even real blood, right? Because we're dead." Eleanor was grasping for anything to defuse the bizarre intimacy of what she was doing. She was trying desperately not to let that VHS tape in her head play back: "I love you, too." She reminded herself that that wasn't this Chidi, and that wasn't this her, who had said that. Even if she did have the sinking realization that she could really relate to that version of her, who had said that so freely to him...

Fortunately he appeared to be too distracted to be paying much attention to what she was doing. He said, "Yeah, and this isn't real pain? Except it is -- because they're *torturing* us." Normally he would have said that louder and more emphatically, but at the moment he still seemed to be recovering from the pain.

So Eleanor just sighed and agreed. "Seriously," she said as she finished cleaning up Chidi's face. She started working on the needles in his right hand. These didn't seem to hurt him as much, coming out at least. Eleanor shuddered to think about how they'd felt going in. She eventually said, "Did Michael warn you about this? He doesn't always tell all of us what the torture plans are for everyone else."

Chidi said, "No, Michael didn't mention it to me. I think something's going on with Janet, because he sent me away when I came to ask, after the fact."

Startled, Eleanor said, "Just how long have you been walking around like that?!" Chidi considered a moment and then said, "Maybe an hour or two?"

"Holy fork!" she said. "Why didn't you try to get them out sooner? I was just sitting around here..."

Chidi sighed. He said, "Well, I didn't know if I should leave them in, you know, so Vicky would think she was succeeding in torturing me," Eleanor broke in: "You mean because she *was* succeeding in torturing you!"

Chidi gave her a look and then continued: "Well, I didn't know if it would be more believable if I was trying to get them out as soon as possible, or if it would be more believable if I left them in."

Eleanor just shook her head at him as she finished with that hand. Chidi sighed with relief. She carefully wiped his hand off with a clean part of the towel and started to reach across to work on his other hand, but he raised his newly-freed hand and said, "It's okay, I can do the rest of it myself, now."

Eleanor felt weirdly disappointed. Maybe it had felt good to find some way to show that she cared about him... some way that *wasn't* a post-coital admission of love that wasn't appropriate for the relationship they had in this iteration of their reality.

But it wasn't impatient, the way he'd said it. There was gratitude in his voice, and in his eyes, when he said he could finish the job himself. It had been a gentle refusal, not an irritated one.

So she just watched him remove the needles in his other hand for a few minutes, trying to sort all that out in her head. Eventually she just gave up and said, "How did she convince you to let her put needles in you at all? If they're supposed to be pretending this is the Good Place?"

Chidi laughed humorlessly. "She said something about acupuncture." He looked sideways at Eleanor, eyebrows raised. Eleanor threw up her hands and shrugged. "*I* wasn't the one who put needles in you!" Chidi grinned a little at her; was he actually teasing her? Eleanor wasn't sure, but Chidi continued: "She said she'd studied to do acupuncture on poor people when she was alive, some sort of vague Good Samaritan thing, and it could be really relaxing, and offered to do it for me... I figured we kind of have to say yes to things they offer to do to us or for us, so they don't get suspicious... So I just went with it."

As he got his other hand free, he tried to find a clean part of the towel to wipe it off with, but the towel was already pretty bloodstained. Eleanor said, "Hang on, I'll get another one."

When she came back, he'd already gotten half of the needles out of his right foot. She handed the towel to him, and as he took it, looking up at her, she thought she caught something more than just friendly appreciation in his eyes as he said, "Thank you." But if it was there, it was only there for a moment, and then he turned back to clean off his other hand and then resumed removing foot-needles.

Eleanor said thoughtfully, "I think she doesn't have the same gift for coming up with psychological torture as Michael does. Say what you will about him, but he is good at his job."

Chidi looked at her. "I do have to admit that you're right, but we are literally talking about people who are trying to torture us. This situation is just..."

"Ridiculous, I know," Eleanor nodded and looked down. Never mind that sometimes this place was only twice as crazy as parts of her life had been. Some of those lonely nights had been just as bad as what Michael had been able to dish out to them before they'd caught on that this was the Bad Place.

Chidi finally finished removing needles, wiped off his feet, and then relaxed back into the couch with a surprisingly contented sigh. He said, eyes closed, "You know, it *is* kind of relaxing, now that all the needles are out. I don't think that's quite how real acupuncture is supposed to work, but, well, there it is. We take what we can get, I guess."

Eleanor looked at him laying there and the images from that tape wandered across her mind again, followed by some more creative thoughts about what she could do with him in that position. She cleared her throat awkwardly and said brightly, "So, do we have class today?"

Chidi raised his head and looked back at her thoughtfully. He said, "Well, Michael seems to be occupied. And I think Tahani had some kind of torture she had to have done to her. So that would be just us and Jason. I... I don't know if I have the energy to try to teach him right now. If you can even call it that."

Eleanor said, "Well... we *could* just do a one-on-one, like old times?" She smiled hopefully. 

Now Chidi cleared his throat awkwardly. She saw his eyes widen, that look of fear she knew he got when he was facing something that intimidated him. He said slowly, "N-no, you know what? I am feeling pretty tired after all... this," and he gestured at the pile of bloody needles on the table.

"Sure, sure. Go get some rest." Eleanor tried to squash the feeling of sadness that erupted out of nowhere. Come on, Shellstrop. Don't let them succeed in making Chidi torture you when he doesn't even know he's doing it.

Chidi smiled, that goofy grin that she increasingly found made her go funny inside like she never had in life, and said, "Thanks, Eleanor." He got up and headed for the bed, up the retractable stairs. He paused before hitting the button that closed the bedroom sliding doors, and looked back at her. "And... Thank you for helping me. It was very unselfish. Thank you for being... such a good friend." 

Even as her heart leaped at the credit for being unselfish, and then tried to take a dive when he said she was a good friend, she saw again something in his eyes and voice that felt like maybe he was trying to convince himself that she was just a friend. 

But what she said was, "You're welcome. Go rest." He nodded, turned, activated the obnoxious clown door, and presumably went to bed.

Eleanor flopped down on the couch and looked over at the pile of bloody needles. She groaned. "I should probably clean that up. But I think I've done enough good for the day. I'm gonna deal with that later." Even if that did mean probably Chidi would deal with it later.

Well. At the very least, Eleanor thought, I *did* help him with something. And it had felt good, for more than one reason. Maybe I should reward myself a *little*? "Hey, Janet? Got any booze?" she said to the air. No response. She remembered Chidi had said Michael was dealing with some Janet related problem. Oh well.

Eleanor looked at the coffee table with its moral philosophy books. She picked up the one she'd been reading when Chidi had come in. Nothing better to do, she thought, but keep improving myself, I guess. She opened the book, sighed, and began reading.

**Author's Note:**

> I read an interview with William Jackson Harper who plays Chidi, and apparently it took hours of makeup folks putting the stuff on, for only about a minute of air-time. So I am happy to give this a little more play, for all of their sakes. :) In addition to having had the thought that it would be cool if there was a little opportunity for tenderness between Chidi and Eleanor because of it.


End file.
